Refining selections and creating masks are unglamorous but utterly essential Photoshop techniques—you’ve got to master both in order to perform tricky compositing tasks, such as extracting a person from an image and then adding a different background.

In Photoshop CS5, the Refine Edge command makes the process less tedious. In today’s installment of Photoshop CS5 Top 5, Deke McClelland shows it in action. Watch as Deke uses Refine Edge and its cousin, Refine Mask, to create a finely crafted mask that encompasses every strand of a model’s hair.

The lynda.com Online Training Library® is full of courses for every member of the Creative Suite family. Browse our Adobe CS5 training to learn what’s new in Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash, Premiere Pro, and more. And stay tuned, because we’ve got more CS5 training coming in the weeks ahead.